Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
aion
Age. The noun behind the adjective English renders eternal.
Matthew 12:32, in every translation this tool compares.
The Victorian age. Ages ago. English uses the word both for a bounded era and for a vague long time, and you sort them instantly.
Because the adjective built on it is doing most of the work in the phrase eternal life, and the noun itself is plainly about periods of time with edges.
Versions read age, world, or forever depending on the phrase. One noun behind all three.
αἰών aion · G165
Aion is an age or era, and the New Testament regularly contrasts this age with the age to come. Rendered world in older English, as in the end of the world, which meant the end of the age.
English has age but uses world and forever in the fixed biblical phrases, so the temporal structure of this-age and the-age-to-come becomes invisible.
When one noun is rendered by three unrelated English words across one book, list them. The list is usually more instructive than the lexicon entry.
Age is the majority rendering in modern versions; the King James reads world in most of these places.
- this age and the age to come: Matthew 12:32; Ephesians 1:21
- aion rendered world in the KJV: Matthew 24:3
- aionios built on this noun
